Squaring the Circle

Managers want programmers above all to meet expectations that are in constant change owing to exogenous financial factors. For managers, "programming" reduces to "effective support" in almost all cases, and few managers are willing to support a New Thing with Nifty Features because the integration of this New Thing with existing business processes becomes their problem.

Well, managers are on to something here.

Effective lawyers stay out of the courtroom. They find ingenious ways to negotiate between adversaries so as to avoid going to trial.

For the same reason the tyro lawyer wants to be Perry Mason, programmers enter the programming field wanting to be super coders. I sure as hell did.

If you must code, do what I did. Get a day job in another line of work you love, and code on the way to work and at home, writing Open Source.

We cannot "score" a man's willingness to downsize his skills to "just enough, just enough, for the city": to literally grade him high when he writes what he knows is crappy code.

This is like Meyer Lansky paying the players of the 1919 Black Sox to throw the game! This is like Willy Loman getting rewarded, year after year, for sucking up to buyers and betraying Linda Loman with a buyer in Boston!

It's obscene when managers speak of pro sports when asking programmers to throw their personal game. When Montana fell back in the 1980s to find an opening for the 49ers, and when Kozlowski calmly, with Ecuadorians up his butt, flicked the ball to Rieff during last summer's World Cup, they were doing good work, but programmers are paid, when you refuse to allow them to implement a good algorithm, for dropping the ball...even from the standpoint of the user, who discovers six months on that the bad algorithm limits his business growth.

Great code is NOT some "effective" crap with hard coded constants and sniggering, snide comments about what a suck job the coder is doing, no matter how much the user loves the system, because people deserve to get satisfaction from a job of work.

Perhaps American companies, because their managers focus ever more narrowly on short-term financial goals, shame and humiliate their workers at companies like WalMart by paying them not enough money to live on, and act as if their aliteracy and ignorance made them Masters of the Universe, don't deserve "great code" anymore.

And it came out in the World Cup, where the Americans treated the game as war, and expected to win through intimidation. The Germans outclassed them by a solid game all the way down, and the way the "minor" players moved calmly down the field was visual art.

[And don't get me started on the slop and the lack of craft of the invasion of Iraq, which was pointed out by military specialists from day one. If you are going to violate international law, do it with some class, at least.]

But you cannot Apgar score scraps of crap, this much I know. These aren't things and they sure aren't miniature, beautiful, wonderful human beings like my kids were when they popped out of their Mom.

You can only score a man, and in too many companies, you're scoring his willingness to year after year be ever more willing to humiliate himself by working unpaid overtime while his wife does the lion's share of raising his kids.